I'm really thinking that maybe it has. I'm thinking that maybe people really aren't that interested in aliens coming to earth and giving people super powers and such or some alien artifact giving someone superpowers.

I think it's more interesting if they get their powers some other way. What do you think?

Personally, I think it matters more what the powers are & what character does with then that they got them from an Alien/Alien Artifact. If I were to go in that direction I'd go with the Alien Artifact route & then later on introduce the Aliens later in story.

But I think in the end you have to be happy with how the story is written. If you don't want to do the who Alien granted super powers then don't.

I am rather hard pushed to come up with a recent example of alien superpowers. It doesn't seem that prevelant in Manga and Anime, but I am very out of touch with the western market.

However, as L says, it is very much down to the surrounding story. If you don't have that right the point of origin of the powers is the least of the problems...

Is it too cliched that a kids gets super powers? Would an adventure story be all right without any powers? I don't know... I'm still tossing things around.

Where are you located again? What do you think of my response to L!? I'm still toying with the plot thickening in a story I'm writing. Do you think the world is tired of superheroes?

Things in stories become Cliches because they work. It'a all about how you work that cliche to your advantage.




Many an adventure story has been writing without a super power in sight

I'm located in England, on the border between Essex and London (a few hundred miles south of HH, incidentally).

As L points out, there are plenty of adventure stories that do not involve superheroes. Hercules and Gilgamesh aside, the superhero genre iteslf is actually fairly modern. However, at the end of the day, the "superhero" parts of the story are really only trappings - decoration on the main body of the story.

Really, there are only two questions:

(1) Do you have a story worth telling?
(2) Do you want it to contain superheroes?

I think it depends on the trope the writer wants to address.

If the story's a "straneg visitors" one, where Earth interacts with "the other" for good or ill then the aliens thing is a great and shorthand way of getting that culture clash.

If the story's about something else than that kind of origin works as a one-line explanation if the thrust of the narrative's somewhere else but detracts from suspension of disbelief if its one of many odd elements.

Shared comics universes aside, its usually more effective to have all the weird things precede from one single anomaly (e.g. existence of magic, genetic mutation, one scientific breakthrough etc). If readers have to believe in magics and aliens and mutants and time travel then it gets hard to establish all those things in a credible way.